What drove sisters of 12 and 13 to kidnap a toddler to abuse?
NexT they tried with a different little girl. ‘They were playing with her,’ prosecutor Miss Barlow told the court. ‘The child was running about, to and from the girls and her mother. The mother was not suspicious, she simply thought the girls were being quite sweet.
‘This went on for about 15 minutes. Then there came a point when she realised she couldn’t see her daughter any more.’
After she realised her daughter was missing, the police were called and CCTV footage was checked, which showed the sisters, one dressed in a distinctive red coat and the other in black, taking the child into lifts on the second floor and out of the building.
A description was issued on police radios and two officers recognised it as matching the sisters, who they knew liked to hang out at Gosforth Park. Their suspicions were right and police found them with the toddler by the swings.
Describing the emotional scene when mother and daughter were reunited, a witness said: ‘I saw a lot of police cars and vans, and a little girl in the park crying, and she was being held by a woman who was also crying.’
The judge, Mr Justice Globe, said the girls had shown no remorse for what they did, and offered no reasonable explanation.
He was, however, convinced they had been influenced by their internet searches and that the toddler would have been harmed if the police had not found her.
‘It is not possible to state with any certainty who was going to harm her, or exactly what that harm would be, except to come to the conclusion it would have mirrored some aspect of the physical or sexual violence and/or exploitation found on the tablet, and in my judgment it is the true reason as to why she was taken.’
The sisters were barely audible when they murmured their guilty pleas in court, and they showed little reaction on sentencing.
For their victim’s family, their actions have had a devastating impact. The 42-year-old father, an NHS registrar, said his wife had been in ‘a downward spiral ever since’ and won’t let their daughter out of her sight.
Although their child is thankfully too young to properly remember what happened, she still had to go through a very distressing intimate physical examination, which proved, as far as doctors could ascertain, that she was unharmed.
Her hard-working parents, who live in a middle-class suburb of Newcastle, kept a dignified silence until the girls were sentenced, but the strain has taken its toll.
Unlike her husband, the mother did not attend the trial and has not wanted to speak publicly about what happened, telling a friend: ‘I am traumatised by the whole ordeal. I have tried my best to move on, but it still haunts me.’
Meanwhile, the father said he ‘welcomed the sentence’. In the living room of their three-storey £250,000 townhouse, the little girl ran around his legs in a pretty floral summer dress and sandals.
‘I hope the sentence is long enough for them to reflect on the offences and to make them safe around other children in the future,’ he said.
‘When our daughter was taken her hair was in braids, and when she was found it was in one big bunch. That can only mean she had been played with, and that is a very disturbing thought for us both.
‘Yes, we got her back and we are so grateful that she was unharmed, but for us it doesn’t end there.
‘The thing that disturbs both of us most is not knowing what happened to her in the time she was with those two girls. We will never know for certain.’